Extraordinary Canadians Series: Lord Beaverbrook

Press baron, entrepreneur, art collector, and wartime minister in Churchill’s cabinet, Max Aitken was a colonial Canadian extraordinaire. Rising from a hardscrabble childhood in New Brunswick, he became a millionaire at age 25, earned the title of Lord Beaverbrook at 38, and by age 40 was the most influential newspaperman in the world. Fiercely loyal to the British Empire, he was nonetheless patronized by London’s upper class, whose country he worked tirelessly to protect during World War II. David Adams Richards, one of Canada’s preeminent novelists, celebrates Beaverbrook’s heroic achievements in this perceptive interpretive biography.

“Top marks must go to David Adams Richards for the sheer poetry of his biography of Lord Beaverbrook, the rural New Brunswick lad who grew up to be a British media baron, a powerful Second World War-era politician and an art patron.”–The Ottawa Citizen

“a biography that should rate four out of four on anyone’s scale”–The Owen Sound Sun Times